Back Porch Endurance

I hate jogging. Passionately. Every couple of years I get fat and I have to start jogging again. Now is one of those times; I'm up to 186 pounds, about 11 pounds above my playing weight. Recently I saw a picture of myself in a wife-beater and I looked like a beached whale. Well, a beached whale in a wife-beater. Traditionally I loathe every moment that I spend jogging, but this time around it's worse than it's ever been before.

Why? Because I live in a majority black neighborhood in downtown Nashville where no one ever jogs. No one. When you jog here, people look behind you to see who you're running from. Once they confirm that you've chosen to run on your own and aren't being pursued, they make fun of you. "Run, Forrest, run!" my neighbors call from the shady comfort of their front porches, from the insides of their air-conditioned cars, from the jungle gym in the neighborhood park.

Yep, I'm white, I have a beard, and I jog. This makes me Forrest Gump to everyone in the neighborhood.

The Boston Marathon -- a Patriot Day staple -- took place Monday and the results were, well, both shocking and encouraging for the U.S. Ethopia's Deriba Merga and Kenya's Salina Kosgei were the winners of the men's and women's races, respectively, but America managed to place third in each division as well, as Kara Goucher and Ryan Hall led the way for the U.S.

Perhaps third is not what most competitors strive for, but America's finish is the best in quite some time, considering that no American has won the event since 1985 when Lisa Larsen-Weidenbach took home the women's title.

Early this week, the story of Jennifer Figge swimming "across" the Atlantic Ocean surfaced. Nearly immediately, skeptics began crunching the numbers and it was painfully obvious she didn't come close to doing many of the things for which credit was being given.

The erroneous nature of the reports comes basically in the distances. When the AP originally reported she swam 2,100 miles, they were calculating how far her boat traveled. In all actuality, Figge probably only swam around 250 miles, if that.

Endurance, thy name is Jennifer Figge. With all the detritus we've had to sort through in sports over the past couple of days, it's a breath of fresh air to hear a story like this one. The 56-year-old became the first woman on record to swim across the Atlantic as she touched land for the first time in almost a month.

According to the AP report, Figge had the dream conquest in her head since the early 1960's during a stormy trans-Atlantic flight, and it turned into reality Thursday night when she arrived on Trinidad's Chacachacare Island (an abandoned leper colony of all places).

There were about 18,000 runners in the Philadelphia Marathon, but two Ukrainians outran them all on a frigid Sunday. Andriy Toptun won in 2 hours, 19 minutes, 58 seconds over the 26.2-mile course, while Vera Ovcharuk clocked in at 2:44.03 in her marathon debut.

"I had to run alone and it was cold, so the time is not too bad," Toptun said through an interpreter.

[American runner Fred] Kieser lost sight of Toptun early in the race.

"I thought I might have a chance at the eight-mile mark, but he just had too much left in the tank," said Kieser, who coaches a high school girls cross country team.

The Philly Marathon, founded in 1954, awards $3,500 to the first-place finishers.

Even if I had a remote shot to win that kind of money in a marathon, I still don't think I'd venture into 30-degree weather for such a grueling race... which is why I give these long-distance runners, like FanHouse's very own This Suit Is Not Black, so much credit for having that kind of will.

Men's Results:
1. Andriy Toptun, 27, 2:19:58 (Ukraine)
2. Fred Kieser, 37, 2:22.45 (Cleveland)

Women's Results:
1. Vera Ovcharuk, 27, 2:44.03 (Ukraine)
2. Abby Dean, 37, 2:48.52 (Philadelphia)

One of the great mysteries of the competitive eating world has finally been explained. The question: Why do Thin Guys Always Win Eating Contests? Bypassing the unfair generalizations that overlook some of the sport's original, more traditionally corpulent champions, Das FanHaus always fine such intense study of the lesser appreciated sports fascinating. The article, originally from PopSci.com, explains:

Muscles stretch when they relax, and when we eat a big meal, our stomach muscles relax so much that they send a message to the brain, which interprets the signal to mean a full belly. Then our brain stops us from eating anymore. But a good training regimen deadens this communication, causing "the signal to the brain or the brain itself to become less responsive to the large volume of food," says Douglas Seidner, M.D., program director for clinical nutrition at the Cleveland Clinic. In other words, you can eat yourself numb, or at least deaden your urge to stop.

Thus explains one of the true paradoxes of speed-eating. Das FanHaus would like to think that there's some kind of secret lab in Japan, or possible Coney Island, where such studies consist of hot dog gorging while being hooked up to all sort of fancy monitoring equipment. Something like those Gatorade ads, but with
more ketchup than sweat.

Today, Spike TV, that veritable cornucopia of Fanhaus materials is giving us fair warning for our holiday viewing. After the various baked and fried turkeys, stuffings, dressings, yams, and pumpkin pies have been thoroughly gorged upon, if the slate of NFL blowouts isn't enough to make you sick, check out the Major League Eating (MLE) Chowdown. The following commercial is definitely NSFW ... containing gritty closeups and full protonic "reversals."



It's time to once again revisit the great debate of "Is this a sport?" To which, Das Fanhaus endorses with an emphatic yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It has the toothlessness of hockey, the full-on obesity of many an NFL lineman, and the flashy sets of that Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament shown occasionally on ESPN. I really hope this bacchanal is live, and that one of the internet's many illustrious online wagering sites will give me some action on this. I want to take the deceptively skinny old-timer plus the points, but I probably won't be able to because gambling is wrong. This is art, and you can't gamble on art ... unless you're in Bellagio in mid February.

You may not have run it in an 1100cc GoKart as in the video above, but you probably recognize anyway: that's the Nurburgring, alternating host track of the German Grand Prix and model for countless video game loops you've probably wrecked a good number of virtual cars on over the years.

The 3.2 mile loop--once dubbed "Green Hell" by driver Jackie Stewart, an homage to both the beautiful pastoral scenery and its twisted difficulty--hosted the Nurburgring 24 Hours this weekend, one of those sadistic endurance races where extraordinarly wealthy people with cars that cost more than the GDP of Romania run their crews and drivers into the ground over nearly impossible race courses because...well, mostly because they can, and you can't, you penniless plebe.

The Manthey Race Team, piloting a fleet of Porsche 911 GT3 (Street legal edition price: only $100,000!), won the day despite a two hour rain delay, with the new 911 RSR performing flawlessly in its first serious outing. If this all seems a bit frilly, cold, and Jean Girard-esque for your tastes, then you are likely not German: the race drew 210,000 spectators throughout the 24 hour ordeal, which features drivers pulling hellbent through the night with headlights on the dark, winding roads of the Ring.

Kobayashi. Michael Buffer. A ton of Kodiak bear. Two plates of hot dogs. A television magic that can only be called "Foxtastic."

Sometime, when you're dying, on your deathbed, you might ask yourself, "Self--did we see anything worth talking about? Anything really, really special in this life?"

We've answered that question for you. Press play, and you may say yes with confidence.

And now: Kobayashi versus a bear in a competitive eating contest.